02/04/2014

The Argument From Ignorance

I see that Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction has been published. Before I get to Kolbert, for whom I have a lot of respect, I am reminded of some text I wrote in another context but didn't publish.

All of my published material on DOTE is guided by my firm belief that the human-made world should make sense. Let me illustrate that view with a typical example of muddled thinking I found at the blog treehugger. The post is called Diasterbation Turns You Blind. That post was written on May 5, 2010, and the author Sami Grover was upset by what he perceived to be a new wave of pessimism in the environmental movement.

I'm not going to argue that civil disruption, climate chaos, or even the end of humanity is not going to happen. That would be stupid.

Right, Sami, that would be stupid. Now he gets to the heart of the matter.

Just as we can never know for certain that our time is up, we also can never know for certain that it isn't. Our knowledge of all systems—both natural and societal—is just way too rudimentary to make absolute claims.

As I've argued many times before, choosing a future and working towards it is always the most effective strategy. To put it another way, activism always beats prophecy.

Privately, I refer to Sami's view of things as the Argument From Ignorance. I have seen it many, many times before, although I've rarely seen it stated so explicitly.

I've had people make that argument with me about my work just before they quit reading DOTE. Those people simply didn't see how I could make the claims I make, although I have always tried my damnedest to thoroughly document those claims and explain how I reached certain "pessimistic" conclusions (I obviously prefer the term realistic).

I utterly reject the argument from ignorance. The human-made world should make sense. If it doesn't, then we're not yet thinking about things the right way, not yet thinking in a way which provides insight into what's going on.

Sami's argument from ignorance allows him to reach the conclusion he wants to arrive at in any case—choosing a future and working toward it is alway the most effective strategy. In so far as our all-encompassing ignorance makes any future possible, Sami feels entitled to conclude that enlightened humans (like him) can choose the one they want, and work to make it so.

Regarding the vague phrase "the most effective strategy," we are entitled to ask what goal that "effective strategy" is being used to achieve. The perfection of human life on Earth? The utopia which is the ultimate end point of Progress? An end to looming self-created self-destruction? If not these things, then what is the goal?

I don't believe that humans choose futures at all. Those "choices" we appear to be making were effectively made for us tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, leaving aside the large role which contingency has had on human development. (For example, what if humans had never stumbled upon the scientific method, and thus developed the technology which scientific insights made possible? What if humans had never successfully developed plant cultivation and animal domestication?)

While I do not disregard the large role contingency has played in human cultural development, I am a determinist, and as Sami Grover correctly perceives, determinism makes a mockery of activism. In my view there is no point in getting frustrated by our inability to change big environmental outcomes (e.g., the climate, marine ecosystems, the 6th extinction) because there was never any possibility that humans would be able to understand their own behavior sufficiently to be able to change it.

Determinism is altogether intolerable to humans generally, and in particular to activists like Sami Grover, who want to change the world. That view must be vigorously rejected, which Sami did.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Kolbert, who did an interview with Mother Jones to publicize her book. I recommend that you read the entire thing, but also wanted to repeat her concluding remarks.

MJ: At one point, you note the possibility that "eventually travel and global commerce [will] cease." What does that suggest about the future of humans on this planet?

EK: Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct. It depends what "eventually" means. But the idea that were going to be around for the rest of global history... I don’t think there’s any scientist who would suggest that is true. It could be millions of years from now. We may leave descendants that are human-like.

MJ: Is this book a call to action?

EK: I very carefully avoided saying what it was. What I've laid out requires action commensurate with the problem. We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action so I’m going to leave it to the reader.

I believe Kolbert wrote the book (in part) to dispel the argument from ignorance with respect to the Sixth Extinction. There is nothing "rudimentary" (quoting Sami) about our knowledge of how human expansion is affecting other species on this Earth.

No one can say they don't know what's happening. Nobody can say they don't understand what is causing the Sixth Extinction. Kolbert's book, and several others, including David Quammen's Song of the Dodo, are there for everyone to read.

Then there is Kolbert's answer to the question about whether the book is "a call to action." For the know-nothing activist, who lives in a world in which anything is possible, everything is a call to action, despite overwhelming, ubiquitous evidence that humans are not only causing the Sixth Extinction, but are also doing virtually nothing to prevent it. A few marginal species conservation "victories" (after the species in question is >90% reduced) do not constitute persuasive evidence that humans have the wherewithal to stop themselves from destroying large parts of the biosphere.

So Kolbert says, carefully, that the book is not "a call to action" because she is loathe to specify what the book is meant to accomplish. Kolbert did not feel she "had a prescription for the kind of action" required to fix the situation. In fact, she is bearing witness to how humans are changing the planet, as she said in this interview.

And that's what I've been doing, too, on DOTE.

Thus Kolbert does not puff her readers up with phony obligatory hope. Good for her.

Kolbert is too polite to say it, but the book is not "a call to action" because there are no collective actions that would fix the mass extinction problem. Humans would have to be something other than they are. And if we were a different species, there probably wouldn't be any need for a "call to action" because we wouldn't be detroying ourselves and large parts of the biosphere. That's the essence of determinism. Humans are a species, so what you see is what you get.

And thus the activist argument from ignorance is simply more of the same blindness that got us to this point-of-no-return in the first place. Sami Grover says "activism always beats prophecy." Nonsense. Genuine prophecy, not Doomer prophecy, takes Human Nature as its basis. Viewed properly, "Us versus Them" activism, as I have written about lately, is simply another goes-nowhere manifestation of that nature.

Comments

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It's a little amusing to see a person declaim absolute truth and then posit an absolute prescription for action. What a blind spot!

Let's play pretend. Let's say that climate change, ocean acidification and the other various existential maladies we've wrought have come to a head, and the world government (let's say there is one) and the balance of people on Earth have seen the light, because it's no longer avoidable. We're fucked, scientists say. Most of us are going to die, quality of life is going to fall through the shitter and we're more or less going to end up back in the stone age with a mere tiny fraction of the current population.

We have to do something!, the world government responds. We can't, say the scientists. Too late, it's baked in, the time's over. Wait!, exclaims the government, we can geoengineer a way out of this mess! That's a really bad idea, say the scientists. We don't recommend it.

But of course they do, because you have to do something(!). Hope and action are always better!

And we end up killing the entire human race.

This is just a very silly, simple little thought experiment, but even it demonstrates that hope and action (ACTION!) aren't necessarily always better.

Incidentally, kudos on bringing things back to your old WYSIWYG paradigm for assessing our species. I always liked that one and was glad to see it mentioned again.

In half a century or so, someone, somewhere, will be holding an emergency workshop in "Geo-engineering for the future". The participants will find their places just as the 237th record storm pounds the city's - for lack of fossil fuel - poorly constructed flood barriers to pieces and swipes them out sea.

As always, I end up agreeing with you, even though you piss me off in the process of getting there.

But, since most of my friends end up doing the same thing with, I can't really say as I hold it against you.

I think that the Archdruid (another one of those "piss me off though I end up agreeing with him" folks) said it the best when he likened the "wish for extinction" as a good reason not to do anything because the die is cast.

Extinction is a kind of silly idea. Now, this doesn't preclude a major die-off, I figure that 90% of the current population will need to go bye-bye before we start getting traction on fixing the problem, but saying that out loud just gets one labelled a pessimist.

Mostly the future is set. I am coming around to the concept of fate. You can call it determinism, but the waxing and waning of a population or a culture is "baked into the cake". We want to think that by writing a book or throwing a prodigious tantrum the world can be made whole and let itself be forced into our narrow model.

Thanks again for the work. I think that, unless I hear from you otherwise, I will post up this particular piece of work on my site as a thought "kicker".

This is a fine piece of work, Dave. You have the gift of clear thought—a true rarity among our species. Your recent works exploring morality have likewise offered some fascinating insights into human group behavior that I had not previously considered.

Since adolescence, I have been deeply disturbed and concerned by overpopulation and the resulting loss of biodiversity and natural resources. Even today, I look out at the blighted landscape here in California, and imagine a time when antelope herds numbered in the millions, countless grizzly bears roamed the mountains, and water fowl darkened the skies. I wonder if all this “progress” was worth it. (I say this as a participant in industrialized society—so I’m clearly I’m no saint.) However, the economy of modern man has come at great expense for other forms of life on this planet. I suppose only rats, weeds, and cockroaches will have found us beneficial!

Notwithstanding, I have never had it in me to become an “activist” in one environmental cause or another—although many of my friends have fit this description. It always seemed to me that aside from the overriding desire to simply belong to a group, the actions of the activists were typically trivial and narrowly focused on mere symptoms of the greater problem—I.e. hacking at the branches and not the root. Virtually all of these groups will agree that man has the requisite wisdom to look into these problems, which he himself created in the first place, and take the proper corrective actions. If we can just get everybody to agree, if we can just implement the right technology, if we can just make the appropriate policy tweaks, well then we would dwell in paradise!

I admit to being conflicted, however. I have had many heated discussions with friends that about damn well went to fisticuffs! I have been labeled defeatist, negative, pessimistic, uncaring, and apathetic. People get really pissed when you try to honestly discuss human nature! (The older I get, the more silent I become.) There is indeed a fine line between realistically assessing man’s condition and living as if you were unaware. I suppose my answer is to find some personal satisfaction in art or your labor—I know of no other way—man is what he is. How would you address this distinction?

Like you, I believe the behaviors of man must be understandable in some context. It is all too predictable that economic growth and mindless adoption of technology trumps restraint every damn time. We've all seen it with our own lying eyes! Can a human think past a few years out? I would say only very rarely does this occur.

Don't expect to get "traction on fixing the problem" at some undetermined point in the future. Homo sapiens is a species so what you see is what you get, as Dave does well to remind us.

In the interview, Kolbert says, "It's pretty widely accepted that the Australian megafauna were done in by people. That was 40,000 years ago." We're often told that "indigenous" people know how to live in harmony with nature, yet they still virtually devastated it. Similarly, the "indigenous" people of New Zealand hunted some species to extinction and started the deforestation. Not that people don't learn from those mistakes, for a while, but we can't expect future humans anywhere to eventually settle down to a lifestyle that is sustainable with whatever is left of the biosphere.

Nikolai Eberhardt asks “Who are we?” A fair question. Well we are a mammal with a modestly evolved brain, about which we are overly proud and a pair of hands which are perhaps the most remarkable invention of evolution on our planet to date. Don’t forget that large brains are common and in particular cetaceans and elephants are much more impressively endowed. We share altruistic tendencies towards our pack and disdain and brutality towards outsiders just like wolves and chimpanzees. We are as sexually promiscuous as Bonobos and are as playful as puppies and bear cubs. But our hands are a marvel. If we are the image and likeness of god then god is a dullard with beautiful hands.

Our hands, unlike the graceful flippers of whales and the tactile trunks of elephants, even with their thousands of muscles, allow us to pass on information to future generations and each other. Once we could write things down and build ever more sensitive measurement instruments we were able to expand humanities scientific knowledge well beyond the dreams of those species lacking hands.

But on the one hand, we’ve managed to measure the age of the universe to within 37 million years plus or minus and on the other most of us don’t have any idea how old the universe is or any concept of deep time whatsoever. They are convinced the dullard designed us a mere few thousand years ago and buried all those dinosaur bones to fool us.

Is there any hope for our survival, then? I don’t know but as a practical matter I don’t think the sixth extinction can be stopped. We’ve probably crossed that Rubicon. Still there is no point in giving up. Is there? We are so close to determining whether an astronaut crossing the event horizon with be burnt to a crisp by quantum mechanical forces or slowly pulled apart by general relativity’s differential gravitational forces. Wouldn’t it be a fine thing to survive long enough to sort that one out?

We are only just beginning to understand entropy. I would like to know and I’m willing to work my ass off against the current of inevitability to find out. That means we should struggle to keep ourselves alive as long as possible or we should die trying. Anyway there is another way to look at things and that is pretending we can survive by doing this or that is loads more fun than giving up. :+)